Reading the letter, I felt as if I’d been kicked in the stomach. I began querying every hospital in Vietnam to find out if Sam was still alive. But in June, before I could discover his fate, I was in a firefight in an enemy-controlled zone. I had thrown four grenades. The fifth one exploded in my hand. I lost an arm and a leg.
Nearly a year later, in March 1968, I finally caught up with Sam. I was just getting the hang of walking with an artificial leg when I visited him at the VA Medical Center in Memphis, Tennessee. Seeing him, I had to fight back the tears. The wiry, smiling soldier’s soldier was blind in the left eye and partially so in the right. Surgeons had removed metal shards and damaged tissue from deep within his brain, and he had been left with a marked depression on the left side of his head. The circles under his eyes told of sleepless hours and great pain.
The old clear voice of command was slower now, labored and with an odd, high pitch. I saw his brow knit as he looked through his one good eye, trying to remember. He recognized me, but believed I had served with him in Korea, his first tour of duty.
Slowly, Sam rebuilt his ability to converse. But while he could recall things from long ago, he couldn’t remember what he had eaten for breakfast. Headaches came on him like terrible firestorms. There was pain, too, in his legs. He had only partial use of one arm, with which he’d raise himself in front of the mirror to brush his teeth and shave.
He had the support of a wonderful family, and once he was home in Wichita, his sister brought his old school sweetheart, Annette Blazier, to see him. A courtship began, and in 1972 they married.
They built a house like Sam had dreamed of—red brick, with a flagpole out front. He had developed the habit of addressing God as “Sir” and spoke to him often. He never asked to be healed. At every table grace, he thanked God for sending him Annette and for “making it possible for me to live at home in a free country.”
• • •
In 1976, Sam and Annette traveled to The Citadel for his 15th class reunion. World War II hero Gen. Mark Clark, the school’s president emeritus, asked about his wounds and said, “On behalf of your country, I want to thank you for all you did.”
With pride, Sam answered, “Sir, it was the least I could do.”
Later Annette chided him gently for understating the case. After all, he had sacrificed his health and career in Vietnam. Sam gave her an incredulous look. “I had friends who didn’t come back,” he said. “I’m enjoying the freedoms they died for.”
I visited Sam in Wichita and phoned him regularly. You would not have guessed that he lived with pain every day. Once, speaking of me to his sister, he said, “I should never complain about the pain in my leg, because B.T. doesn’t have a leg.” I’d seen a lot of men with lesser wounds reduced to anger and self-pity. Never a hint of that passed Sam’s lips, though I knew that, every waking moment, he was fighting to live.
On October 18, 1984, after 17 years, Sam’s body couldn’t take any more. When we received the news of his death, a number of us from Bravo Company flew to Wichita, where Sam was to be buried with his forebears.
The day before the burial, his old exec, Dean Parker, and I went to the funeral home to make sure everything was in order. As Dean straightened the brass on Sam’s uniform, I held my captain’s hand and looked into his face, a face no longer filled with pain. I thought about how unashamed Sam always was to express his love for his country, how sunny and unaffected he was in his devotion to his men. I ached that I had never told him what a fine soldier and man he was. But in my deep sadness I felt a glow of pride for having served with him, and for having learned the lessons of leadership that would serve me all my life. That is why I am telling you about Samuel R. Bird and these things that happened so long ago.
• • •
Chances are, you have seen Sam Bird. He was the tall officer in charge of the casket detail at the funeral of President John F. Kennedy. Historian William Manchester described him as “a lean, sinewy Kansan, the kind of American youth whom Congressmen dutifully praise each Fourth of July and whose existence many, grown jaded by years on the Hill, secretly doubt.”
There can be no doubt about Sam, about who he was, how he lived and how he led. We buried him that fall afternoon, as they say, “with honors.” But as I walked from that grave, I knew I was the honored one, for having known him.
Submarines to the Rescue!
BY RALPH SEELEY WITH ALLEN RANKIN
We were loafing southward toward Guam on the afternoon of July 8, 1972, the periscope of our black, 300-foot nuclear submarine, the USS Gurnard, cleaving gentle waves. Suddenly I felt the sub dive, change course and throb with the strain of “Ahead flank,” maximum forward speed. I groaned. After 63 days and nights submerged, on maneuvers, all of us aboard—I was an electrician’s mate—were looking forward to shore leave. And such abrupt action could only mean trouble.
The public-address system clicked on. “Men, this is the captain speaking. We are proceeding to the scene of a B-52 crash about 300 miles southwest of Guam. We will arrive around midnight to rendezvous with the Barb [another nuclear sub] and attempt to find and pick up survivors.” There was a pause. “The bomber’s crewmen have bailed out squarely in the path of Typhoon Rita. So we’ll be rigging for heavy seas and making other special preparations. That is all.”
Grumbling ceased. Here at last was real action, and of a welcome kind for an attack sub—a chance to save lives. But elation was tempered with concern, for our craft was neither built nor equipped for this kind of mission.
• • •
Nearly as big as a light cruiser, and displacing 5000 tons, the multimillion-dollar Gurnard is as sophisticated as a moon-going spaceship. She, like her sister nukes, can hide silently and almost indefinitely in the black ocean depths, or, far below the worst storms, race to any point needed. With her remarkable detection and weapons systems she can hunt down an enemy sub—or a task force—and nail it.
But the same things that give us our shark-like maneuverability underwater make us clumsy on top. The Gurnard is as unwieldy as a barge, even in a calm harbor. On the surface, in high waves, her cigar-shaped hull will roll and wallow like a crippled whale.
Moreover, her conning tower or “sail,” rising 35 feet (over three stories) above the waterline, can be entered, in a rough sea, only through the small bridge hatch at the top. And worse, her sail-planes (diving-control fins), jutting like aircraft wings from each side of the tower, pose formidable obstructions in trying to pull any survivor aboard.
Finally, we submariners, submerged much of the time (260 of the past 365 days, in this case), seldom get good at such quaint arts as handling lines or working on pitching decks. But there were no other ships within a day’s reach of the survivors.
• • •
Our skipper, Cmdr. Clyde R. Bell, 41, visited every section of the sub and organized the 140 men into small brainstorming groups. “Work on how to get survivors alongside and aboard without injuring them,” he said. “We don’t have the equipment, so we’ll have to invent it.”
The Gurnard reached the disaster vicinity about 11 p.m. “Surface, surface, surface!” blared the p.a. system, and our sub lurched up into the storm. Immediately, a great wave crashed on our bow, driving our nose down and sending us into an accidental dive. “Back emergency! Full rise stern planes!” The ship shuddered with this full-speed-in-reverse effort. The helmsman yelled, “Depth 145 feet and we’re still going down!” Finally, the sub’s impromptu descent was arrested. At an instrument panel in Engine Control, I worked with shaking hands. Faces around me were white. It was not an encouraging beginning.
• • •
Some 30 miles away, as the Barb surfaced, a series of mountainous waves struck her broadside, sending her into a fast roll. As she listed to the 50-degree point, men found themselves almost standing on the walls, or dangling from supports. Almost on her beam, she caught herself and began to come back upright. Then, swinging about to head into the waves, the Barb attai
ned a precarious stability and was ready to begin her search.
From the control center directly beneath the conning tower, Cmdr. John G. Juergens, 39, and four men climbed the high, pitching ladder up to the bridge. They opened the hatch and stepped out into the wild, pitch-black night. The shrieking storm, with gusts up to 100 m.p.h., was heaving up seas so high that every other wave or so swept over their small cockpit. Safety harnesses kept the men from being washed overboard.
Yet two men, Lt. Ron Ricci and Chief Torpedoman Jon Hentz, dared climb out onto the port-side sailplane. Dipping into the angry sea on every port roll, they managed to attach a Jacob’s ladder to the sail for bringing aboard survivors.
• • •
Overhead, storm-buffeted airplanes from Guam and the Philippines circled, keeping faithful vigil on the downed airmen bobbing on the sea in tiny survival-kit rafts. Twice in the next hour, a low-skimming Navy P-3 Orion got a radar fix on the Barb and, with radio and searchlights, directed her toward the nearest raft. As the sub turned, her nose dug in and a wall of water buried the men strapped to her tower. By the time the ship maneuvered, the raft had blown too far away. The Barb was directed to a second raft, which swooped up on a wave crest only 40 feet away. A line was shot to the raft but there was no response.
Together, the storm and the darkness were too much. Commander Juergens took his soaked and frustrated topside unit below and ordered the hatch shut. Half of the 130 crewmen—no more accustomed to typhoon seas than a landlubber—were violently seasick.
On the Gurnard, too, scores of our men were so sick that, in less demanding circumstances, they would have been in the rack. About 2 or 3 a.m., the decision was reluctantly made to wait until morning, and we slipped back into the quiet depths. But few of us got much sleep. Wide-eyed men sat drinking coffee, hashing over various plans to bring survivors into the ship—and thinking what it must be like up there adrift in that typhoon.
• • •
Capt. LeRoy Johnson lay alone in the tiny one-man raft that was part of his survival kit. He had been in the sea for 19 hours—ever since his huge B-52 had inexplicably gone out of control, and he and his crew had had to “punch out!” Now, he could hear the hiss of each comber as it approached. Each time, he braced himself for the swooping, roller-coaster ride, then bailed out the raft when the wave was past. Because he had already capsized several times, he had tied himself in.
The two Air Force officers whom the Barb had so briefly spotted had climbed into one of the dozens of seven-man rafts which an Air Force cargo plane had dropped in the rescue area. The pair were exhausted from the incessant bailing, and from trying to stay upright. They had seen an enormous black cross, eerily lighted and with figures standing on it, rise from the sea and loom for a moment above them before it sank behind a wave—the Barb’s conning tower. Could they hold out until the sub rescued them? Then, about 4 or 5 a.m., a third officer paddled his raft over to theirs and joined them.
In a large raft by himself, Airman Dan Johansen had it easier. With his more lightly weighted rubber float buoyantly tobogganing up and down the watery slopes, he was able—remembering his survival training—to relax and try to get some sleep. Now and then he succeeded.
• • •
At daylight, we surfaced and resumed the search, following directions from the planes. The Gurnard was rolling so hard that her sailplanes dug into the water on each side. “We’re not putting any people up on the bridge until we see something to justify the risk,” the captain announced.
Our periscope scanned the ocean. Soon it peered down into a rubber raft, and later into another. Both were empty.
About 8 a.m. we approached a third raft, and the cry came from the conning station, “There’s somebody in there!” Then, as the head of the prone, still figure in the raft moved: “He’s alive!”
The 40-foot ladder up to Gurnard’s bridge was swinging like a pendulum, but Commander Bell made it up, followed by Lt. Cmdr. Ed Morgan, Chief Torpedoman Bill Nielsen and Torpedoman Harold Hermann, the ship’s best swimmer, ready in a wet suit. Cracking orders down the bridge telephone, Morgan maneuvered the sub toward the raft, at one moment level with the high bridge on a giant wave; the next, 50 feet below it.
Chief Nielsen put the line-throwing gun to his shoulder and fired. The projectile arced out perfectly, dropping the trailing line right across the little raft and into the hands of Air Force Capt. LeRoy Johnson. He grabbed the line and tugged—but it parted! The sub approached once more, and Nielsen made another flawless shot with the line gun. Again the light nylon strand snapped. As the exhausted pilot tried to sit up in his plunging raft, Commander Bell grabbed the power horn. “Don’t waste your strength,” he shouted. “We are not leaving! We’ll be with you until you are safely aboard this ship!”
Wedging himself into a corner of the bridge cockpit, Nielsen feverishly jury-rigged heavier line to the gun’s projectile. Meanwhile, Morgan lined the ship up for a third pass.
• • •
Down in Engine Control, the engine-change bells were dinging like toyland on Christmas Eve. Near my station, the sweating throttleman was spinning his three-foot wheel almost constantly. Normally he executes about 15 “bell changes” a day. This time it was 150 on that two-hour watch!
But now, as the order “Full astern” came to slow down the ship, a tiny wire in an electric regulator melted, and a sobering report went up from the engine room: “We have lost No. 2 main generator. We can give you only limited power.”
Nonetheless, up on the bridge, Commander Morgan managed one more flawless approach. Nielsen shot off his makeshift missile of heavier nylon. Whirling out in crazy spirals through the rain, it settled—and the flier had the line in his hands. This time it didn’t break, and the pilot used it to pull a thick tow rope to his raft. Then our men began hauling him toward the sub.
Plan A was to bring him up the forward side of our high conning tower, which was like a wildly swinging, wet, windowless silo. A boarding ladder—two cargo nets lashed together and weighted with heavy steel bars—was to be dangled from the bridge. We assembled all the gear but then realized there was too much equipment to get up to the bridge, and abandoned this plan.
So backup Plan B was immediately ordered. It consisted of a gigantic, clumsy piece of “fishing tackle.” The “hook,” a homemade sling-type harness, was tossed down to the flier, who struggled into it. The line ran up the “pole” of the sub’s hydraulic antenna mast and down the hatch. In a passageway some 50 feet below stood a double file of 15 sailors—the “reel power.”
Commander Morgan waited for the strategic moment when the ship would be starting down into a wave trough, the raft starting up on a crest. “Take up the slack,” he ordered. Someone pulled a lever and the hydraulic mast started up, first snapping the line taut and then, as it shot to its full height, jerking the pilot from the raft. He dangled in midair, in peril of being bashed against the tower’s side.
“Pulling detail . . . Heave! Heave!”
Below, the men slipped and scrambled, trying to keep an even strain on the line. As the sub took a hard roll, most of them fell, but all kept pulling until the order came, “Avast heaving! Ease her down!”
Captain Johnson, dangling over the narrow bridge, was lowered into four pairs of reaching hands. “Thanks,” he said. And then, staring in semiconscious amazement at the contraption that had helped heave him aboard: “Interesting.”
• • •
Meanwhile, Barb was retrieving other survivors, who, having bailed out of the bomber before their commander, were miles away. Aircraft directed the Barb to the three Air Force officers lying exhausted in their single large raft. Getting the nod from Skipper Juergens, lank, steel-muscled Chief Torpedoman Jon Hentz, the Barb’s best scuba diver, plunged into the mountainous waves to carry a tow line toward the raft 200 feet away.
He risked being killed by the ship, which lurched so high above him he could see the barnacles on its bottom. On the swim, he went under sever
al times. But he made it. The three airmen were fished out one at a time and pulled by sheer muscle power up to the bridge.
The Barb was then directed to the raft containing Dan Johansen. Standing on the deck of the sub’s lunging sailplane, Electronics Technician Gerry Spaulding fired a direct line-gun hit on the raft. Johansen caught the line on the fly and was soon hauled aboard with a sling.
• • •
Long before the Barb and Gurnard reached Guam, congratulations and awards were pouring in on the ships’ radios for our part in the joint Air Force–Navy mercy mission—“one of the most difficult in our history,” as Defense Secretary Melvin Laird called it. Each ship got a Meritorious Unit Commendation, and the ten submariners who played perilous topside roles received individual commendations.
As someone said later, back on Guam: “The Navy hasn’t changed a bit, in one respect, since the days of John Paul Jones. That typhoon showed us that the most important thing, even on the fanciest super-ships, is still men—seamen.”
Beyond the Call of Duty in Vietnam
BY KENNETH Y. TOMLINSON
Braving heavy communist gunfire one muggy afternoon in April 1969, helicopter pilot Lt. Robert Vinson picked up eight seriously wounded men deep in the treacherous Ashau Valley of Vietnam, and flew them to the base hospital. It was the end of three grueling days of combat and resupply missions for this 23-year-old from Belmont, Massachusetts. In that time, he had seen four of his squadron’s helicopters shot down and three pilots killed.
But, weary as he was, Vinson had still another mission he wanted to fly. Right after debriefing, he took a chopper 20 miles north to a village nestled among the rice paddies of the Huongdien Peninsula, just below the Demilitarized Zone. He trudged through a muddy field to a half-finished school. Surveying the work, he said to a Vietnamese builder, “We’re going to need more cement. I’ll have some here in a few days.”
In the last year, even while fighting communism, Vinson has been engaged in a personal war of his own—against sickness and ignorance in rural Vietnam. When he first visited the isolated Huongdien Peninsula in early 1969, three poorly equipped medical dispensaries served 34,000 people. There were only nine schools, each riddled with bullet holes, and the sole, two-room high school had to hold classes in three shifts. “This is intolerable,” he said. “These people must be helped.”
Reader's Digest Soldier Stories Page 10
